Category: my annual report

At this point, we offer each of the following contestants 48 hours (until 16:30 PST 2009 February 5) to send a ranking of their top three picks to dan@mrmeyer.com (excluding their own). A ranking seems almost vulgar in light of all this great introspection and design but these prizes won’t give themselves away, etc.

I like not having the scale shown on these. Full confession, I did not track all of this data, so some of the numbers are guessed. My personal favorite slide is the one with the least fact behind it and my least favorite is the one where I can tell you the numbers exactly. Go figure.

I’m going to side with Don Norman, and say that In a proper design, both are important. Though, if there is some imperfection, I think that having beautifully laid out information that is incomprehensible is worse than an eyesore that tells a good story.

I only had two infographics. Why? I don’t keep a spreadsheet with the minutiae of my life. I know that some consider this useful, or therapeutic. In my family, it usually comes with a three letter acronym diagnosis from the DSM IV. No aspersions on Dan or Mr. Feltron, but I’m not into that.

I’m slightly disappointed with this set of slides I made because they don’t tell a story. My slides from last year (2007) told a story — of moving to NYC and changing careers. There was text which explained the stages of my year. This year my slides — hastily done — don’t tell a coherent story.

I abandoned it, to a certain extent. My content means a lot to me, if only because I bothered to track the data all year long, but my design work is simply functional — a staid set of bar charts and line graphs. See you next time.

started my dy/dan 4 slide project. i might not finish… just not inspired and don’t have knowledge of the tools to do this. — Sam Shah, who finished second place (!) last year.

I was shocked, frankly, we had twenty entries last year to what was a pretty demanding competition. I’m pushing my luck a second time only because I’m enjoying a fairly transcendent experience designing my own, the kind of happy nerdery you can’t keep to yourself, you know?

I mean, this bar chart is sharp as a blade, right? Any guesses what month my long-distance girlfriend became my close-distance wife?

Throughout 2008 I tracked dozens of variables, most collected from categories of geographic location, recreation, food & beverage, and communication. I collected these data in an Excel file comprising 14 worksheets in excess of 100,000 cells. The process took minutes per day and that minimal investment is paying out huge returns here at the end of the year as I learn new techniques for data analysis, extrapolate conclusions from 2008 — some of which I knew intuitively while others surprised me — and represent them visually.

The work has been nothing short of exhilarating and I want to encourage you to undertake it also.

Instructions

Design information in four ways to represent 2008 as you experienced it. This can mean:

four separate PowerPoint slides with one design apiece,

one JPEG with four designs gridded onto it,

an Excel spreadsheet inset with four charts,

etc.

Feel free to use pies, bars, dots, bubbles, Sparklines, stacks, or designs of your own construction.

While they thought on it, we made Feltron notebooks: graph paper, folded, cut into quarters, and bound with repurposed file folders the last teacher left behind.

I showed them how I designed my own Feltron notebook (Coudal’s Field Notes, natch) to maximize page use.

How Do We Grade Your Life?

We discussed grading. What would an A look like? An F? A C? I steered the conversation towards three criteria:

the interesting-ness of the variables chosen

their consistent tracking

their clear & pretty design

We discussed interesting and un-interesting variables. Some students are rocking this thing all semester long, counting calories, tracking everyone they text over a semester, tallying every ounce of everything they drink.

Other students are skating, tracking the number of days they’re late to school, tracking the number of times they sneeze, etc.

We conferenced, each student and I, and I suggested changes, both to add value to their final project and to make the assignment easier for themFor instance, 100 kids decided to track “TV Watched.” “What does that mean?” I’d ask. “Uh.” they’d reply. “So make it min/channel/day or min/show/day, whichever you prefer.”.

Checkpoints

This thing runs on bi-weekly checkpoints [pdf] where I move around the class and verify that everyone’s keeping up.

One Indication This Assignment Wasn’t Stupidly-Conceived

Not one student has taken exception to the workload. Several students, without my prompting, have integrated a notebook update into their daily classroom routine.

The Moment I Fell In Love With The Thing

One freshman decided to track the cigarettes she smoked each day. Not because she wanted to scandalize me or her classmates. She just “always kinda wondered.”

One Month Later

I surveyed 99 students last week: “how much time do you spend updating your Feltron notebook each day?”

The average response was 5.5 minutes with a maximum of 31 minutes and a minimum of 0 minutesNo idea what the minimum’s about..

Then I’ll fabricate entire data sets. eg. some girl’s caffeine intake over the course of a semester. We’ll run through several infodesigns and discuss which ones tell the most effective, truthfulAll better? story. We’ll use other data sets (eg. hours spent studying) to introduce some superficial correlation.

Uh. That’s all I have.

The Big Questions

Do we make the graphs in Excel or work out the math by hand? One option gets ’em dirty with the math. One is more useful to their post-grad experience.

What do I do when a student comes to class a month into the project and claims her dog ate her Feltron notebook? The question, as of first period today, ain’t hypothetical.

The Regret

I should’ve collaborated with someone here. I don’t know another teacher, period, who’s out there sweating the connection between language and math like I am here which makes The Feltron Project something of a blind jump off the high dive when it ain’t altogether obvious that the pool is filled with water, thumbtacks, or nothing.